Faithful feel the rapture as they ascend to heaven

TV VIEW:AMERICAN PREACHER Harold Camping had predicted that Jesus Christ would return to earth on Saturday and true believers would be swept up, or "raptured", into heaven. When the deadline passed, the poor divil was scundered and ridiculed for being a bit out with his forecast, the believers seemingly still of this earth.

The truth is, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Yes, believers in, say, Alabama and Montana might still have been waiting for lift-off after the appointed hour – some of them having paid a company called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets to look after their dogs, cats, cockatoos and horses after they left the planet. (And, sadly, they don’t offer refunds – company policy.)

But believers in Cardiff for the day were indeed swept up to heaven, in complete raptures after a sporting contest the likes of which few will have ever seen. Or will see again.

The Son of BOD, Jonny Sexton, had spirited them heavenward and out of the Millennium Stadium, rewarding their faith with two tries, four penalties and three conversions.

No more than the rest of us, Sky’s Will Greenwood was struggling for breath at full-time, just about finding enough to beckon Sexton for a quick word.

In contrast, the 28-point man had, to be honest, the look of a fella who’d just cut the grass, no more fatigued than that, and was perfectly happy to explain to Will how Leinster did what Leinster did.

“We regrouped at half-time,” he said.

Now, if any of us is ever granted eternal life, we still wouldn’t live long enough to hear a more delightfully understated assessment of how a sporting comeback as stupendous as that came to pass. As Ieuan Evans put it on Sky, “anybody who wasn’t captivated or mesmerised by that game hasn’t got a soul”.

Regrouped?

When Northampton made it 22-6 just before half-time, Stuart Barnes, in the Sky commentary box, perhaps fearing the viewers would leave in their droves to strim their hedges or the like, reassured us that a comeback was “doable”. But then he added a but, before his voice tailed off.

And it was, you sensed, a very Big But too, a comeback as likely as, say, Harold Camping making a go of it as a fortune teller.

Miles Harrison felt obliged to step in, insisting that “you couldn’t rule out a Leinster comeback”. Barnes accepted that in life nothing is impossible, but reminded Harrison that “Northampton are tearing them to pieces” and that Leinster were approaching a world record for missed tackles.

Harrison, undeterred, advised us to “prepare yourselves for a Leinster storm at the start of the second half”.

Right.

Back in the sky studio our presenter and panel summed up the first half thus:

Simon Lazenby: “Leinster don’t know what’s hit them them!”

Sean Fitzpatrick: “Northampton are totally blowing Leinster off the park!”

Ieuan Evans: “Leinster look shellshocked, they’ve been hit by a runaway train!”

Not much positivity there, then.

But Paul Wallace wasn’t waving a white flag just yet, his optimism based largely on the assumption that Leinster’s scrum couldn’t possibly be as cataclysmically dire in the second half as it was in the first.

Dean Ryan, Sky’s “Frontline” analyst, showed us, with the help of dancing arrows, just what went wrong in that scrum, the sequence reminding us, in a somewhat surreal kind of way, of the opening to Dad’s Army. Remember? “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Hitler?” over dancing arrows showing the Nazis and the Allies jostling in and around Belgium?

“Can the 2009 champions find a way back,” asked Lazenby. “If they can, it’s going to be a classic.”

His panel smiled, in an “ah bless” kind of way.

The second half.

“Greatness personified,” said Harrison as Leinster did unto Northampton what Northampton had done on to them in the first half. Only a little more forcefully. Indeed, Leinster’s dancing arrows nigh on left their bewildered opponents retreating to the outskirts of Brussels.

Leinster, it’s fair to say, had regrouped.

Wallace beamed like a cat trapped in a creamery overnight, and was gracious enough not to splutter when Fitzpatrick said: “You’ve got to feel sorry for Northampton.”

Sporting-wise, it was the equivalent of crown jewels, which made it an even greater bummer RTÉ had to make do with showing the game at 9.0 that night.

Mind you, that might have been a blessing for George Hook. Can you imagine what he’d have had to say at half-time?

At full-time? In raptures. Swept up to heaven.

“See? I was kind of right,” Harold Camping is more than entitled to say.